It seems fair. If executives were making the decisions that landed the company in a difficult situation, it's only fair they bear the consequences of their failure. Besides, it's difficult to empathize when their compensation packages are, while market rate, significantly higher than the engineers who do their bidding. I wouldn't be surprised if the fraction of executives that would be able to retire at this point was much higher than the one for engineers, which is likely much higher than the one for non-engineering individual contributors.

Also remember that since it's executives who set executive compensation, there is some incentive to inflate it.